By ART THIEL, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Updated 10:00 pm, Thursday, June 24, 2004

At least that's what management recommends for Sonics fans who contemplate placing index fingers down throats upon hearing that the club drafted yesterday an 18-year-old kid who couldn't be more obscure if he were in the witness protection program.

The choice of Robert Swift of Bakersfield, Calif., is so insider-hoops that miner's helmets were distributed to writers yesterday before beginning the explanation. Even his coach for next year, Nate McMillan, had not seen him play or spoken to him before his selection.

The high school kid didn't do a workout for the Sonics. Or any other NBA team. In the hysterical run-up to the draft, he barely left home. He's been in the back, in the corner, in the dark of big-time hoops so profoundly that Seattle may have been the only city where he could survive as a pro, owing to the lack of direct sunlight.

But the pro hoops wise guys, a clique that has rarely included Sonics employees, know the kid. What they say is that the 7-foot, 245-pounder is an instinctive and gifted back-to-the-basket center, which has not been seen in the NBA, aside from Shaquille O'Neal, since game shorts barely covered the crotch.

That's throwback point No. 1.

Throwback point No. 2: Two of Swift's biggest advocates were Jack Sikma and Lonnie Shelton, 40 percent of the starting lineup of the Sonics' 1979 champions. Shelton lives in Bakersfield, where his son played with Swift. Sikma is a Sonics assistant coach who lived in the film room this spring scouring bits of video in the manner of a scientist with a single dinosaur bone.

However, none of those calls likely came from Sonics season-ticket holders, unless it was to deliver a Dennis Miller-style rant about how their money will never again go to a franchise operated more haphazardly than Baghdad Power & Light.

By the frank admission of all involved, the kid will be worthless to the Sonics next year, and probably the year after that. So for those who were anticipating the Sonics making a dramatic move to upgrade from their worst season since 1986 (the year after Swift was born), which produced attendance that ranked 23rd in the league and an operating deficit in the millions of dollars, thanks for coming and we'll see you around 2007.

Which might explain why majority owner Howard Schultz and president and part-owner Wally Walker made no public appearance yesterday, believed to be a draft-day first for them. The bunker apparently was more pleasant.

The guy who really deserves to have his bloomers in a knot is McMillan, who already has three centers who can't play. Barring changes prior to 2004--05, adding Swift makes for 28 feet of stiff, a record believed second only to Gulliver.

Earlier in the week, the team's director of player personnel, David Pendergraft, explained the draft problem this way:

"Do you draft for the coach or for the franchise?"

The coach, along with veteran players and nearly the entirely of the fan base, want something for now.

The coach and the players know their career lengths can be measured by watches, not calendars, and the fans can spend their discretionary dollars on cotton candy to find more value.

For his part, McMillan remained the noble soldier.

"We're really focusing on free agency," he said, persuaded long ago that after about the first three draft selections, there was virtually no potential draftee who would take minutes from players on his roster.

McMillan does get for free Nick Collison, the forward who missed his rookie year after shoulder surgeries. But this draft was for the distant future, even if it resembled the distant past when the Sonics took a geeky unknown center from Illinois Wesleyan, an NAIA college whose level of competition might not have been a whole lot more than the Bakersfield prep rounds.

"With me, I was 190 pounds and learned to play the game facing the basket," Sikma said. "I had to learn how to play with my back to the basket. I might have had a little more maturity and emotional control, but Robert is 235 pounds at age 18 and has innate skills with his back to the basket. He has good feet, good balance, knows to keep the ball high and reacts well to the ball.

"He's a little like McHale in the way he uses his body, and is a little like Parish with the ability to go over everyone to shoot and rebound.

"We have to hang some meat on him. But it would be a lot tougher for me to sit here and promote someone I'm not confident in. That's not a problem now."

So here's throwback points No. 4 and No. 5:

Selecting the unknown, 6-11 Sikma 27 years ago drew a firestorm of criticism. But the Sonics reached the Western Conference finals in each of his first three seasons, and by winning the title his second season, locked him in as one of the game's elite big men.

And in the absence of empirical data on one so obscure, there's the law of averages (blind-squirrel-and-acorn division): Select enough 7-footers, and an NBA club is bound to stumble into a good big man at least every quarter century or so.